We now have a minimal sdcard only image for the Cubietruck from our unsigned (and as yet uncompleted) plague-builder output.

This image has been produced by the RootFS Build Factory (a 2015 CentOS GSoC Project from Mandar Joshi sponsored by the CentOS Project). While the RBF is not yet close to being a finished product, it was able to be used to create this image. This is our first published image built using RBF, which looks to be to be a very promising and useful GSoC project for CentOS on ARMv7.

Before I tell you where the image is, I want to point out (with emphasis ) that THIS IMAGE IS PRE-ALPHA, PROOF OF CONCEPT ONLY !!!. It is based on the Source Code from CentOS-7 (1503) release with none of the follow on updates and is not suitable for use in any environment that you care about at this point. In fact, as this article is being posted, we only have 2068 of the 2523 Source Packages even built for armv7hl at this point. The repositories used for this proof of concept are the unsigned direct output from our ongoing build of armv7hl and while the minimal install works (and should continue to work), there may not always be repoclosure there and some packages outside the minimal install may not have all their dependencies yet built, etc.

If you are interested in helping us get armv7hl working with CentOS-7, please join the Arm-Dev mailing list where we are doing the community build now.

Install instructions are available from this post to the Arm-Dev mailing list. If you are going to try this image, you should really join the list as that is going to be where the community can answer questions about it.

Next up on the armv7hl front should hopefully be a minimal install image from the same plague-builder repos for the RaspBerry Pi2 in the next week or so.

As I have already pointed out, we do not yet have an armv7hl release, in fact to date we only have about 82% of the packages for the release that actually build at this point. We can use the help of people who understand the boards in question … especially vendors. Join the Arm-Dev list and give us a hand.